Thursday, August 25, 2016

On a hot July day in
1967, Odelle Bastien climbs the stone steps of the Skelton gallery in London,
knowing that her life is about to change forever. Having struggled to find her
place in the city since she arrived from Trinidad five years ago, she has been
offered a job as a typist under the tutelage of the glamorous and enigmatic
Marjorie Quick. But though Quick takes Odelle into her confidence, and unlocks
a potential she didn't know she had, she remains a mystery - no more so than
when a lost masterpiece with a secret history is delivered to the gallery.

The truth about the
painting lies in 1936 and a large house in rural Spain, where Olive Schloss,
the daughter of a renowned art dealer, is harbouring ambitions of her own. Into
this fragile paradise come artist and revolutionary Isaac Robles and his
half-sister Teresa, who immediately insinuate themselves into the Schloss
family, with explosive and devastating consequences . . .’

I appreciated Jessie Burton’s award-winning, bestselling The Miniaturist. I spent a Christmas
hand-selling it at Waterstones and it was a well-written, well-crafted novel. But
I loved The Muse. I engaged with it
and its characters, heart and mind. They’re both great books, but The Muse is the one I’d go back to and
the one that personally hit the spot. It had me from the selected quote before
the story even began:

‘Never again will a single story be sold as though it were the only
one.’ – John Berger

This is an epigraph which has been used in many well-known,
acclaimed novels – it seems to have a track record of success of its own. John
Berger is understandably part of most undergraduate studies in literature but
it’s a quote that has so much resonance in so many fields of study, and life.
At my university, we were shown Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk on the ‘Danger of a Single Story’– and I’ve mentioned it before on this blog.

Jessie Burton’s The
Muse certainly draws upon this idea of the single story – about the different
ways things can be perceived, the way that different angles can convey
different meanings, and the way that narratives can be controlled to include
and exclude. It is, at its heart, about art in all its senses and incarnations
– about responsibility, representation, power, dignity and consent:

‘It doesn’t matter what’s the truth; what people believe becomes the
truth.’

Burton’s parallel narratives depict two women in different
eras, both talented and creative, and yet both – partly because of
circumstance, and partly by choice – hiding their gifts or holding back.
Originally from Trinidad, Odelle Bastien (1960s) still feels an outsider- she
explains:

‘I was – both by
circumstance and nature – a migrant in this world, and my lived experience had
long become a state of mind’

Burton navigates these angles of migration and ethnicity sensitively
and thoughtfully, exploring how it feels to be away from your country of birth
and trying to forge an identity in a place where – whether by virtue of gender
or race – you may not be taken so seriously, and may feel compelled to hide
away.

Marjorie Quick becomes a sort of mentor, as well as
employer, eager to unlock Odelle’s talents and encourage them. Back in the
1930s, a young woman named Teresa seeks to do the same for Olive Schloss, the
daughter of an art collector (also living away from home, in Spain) who paints
secretly and brilliantly (better than Teresa’s artist half-brother, Isaac). The
parallels and the way in which Burton toys with the seams of both stories and
characters is delightful and utterly compelling. Each tiny twist seems to raise
the stakes until the simple truth becomes the ultimate and most quietly devastating
prize.

The dynamic between all the characters held me captivated.
Like Odelle, I was fascinated by the enigmatic nature of Marjorie Quick and I loved
that the bonds between women – between Odelle and Marjorie, and Olive and
Teresa - are the most complex and intriguing. Both go beyond the connections
that Odelle and Olive feel to the men in their lives and endure in a much stronger
and more meaningful way.

The Muse is a book
that is so cleverly layered that I feel I want to reread it again and again and
to look at these characters from all angles. For now, these are just a few
introductory thoughts on a novel I admire more each time I think about it.

Adichie’s ‘The Danger of a Single Story’ TED
talk quotes:

‘I realised that I had
become so immersed in the media coverage of Mexicans that they had become one
thing in my mind, the abject immigrant. I had bought into the single story of
Mexicans and I could not have been more ashamed of myself.’

‘So that is how to create
a single story, show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over
again, and that is what they become’.

‘There is a word, an
Igbo word, that I think about whenever I think about the power structures of
the world, and it is "nkali." It's a noun that loosely translates to
"to be greater than another." Like our economic and political worlds,
stories too are defined by the principle of nkali: How they are told, who tells
them, when they're told, how many stories are told, are really dependent on
power.’

‘The single story
creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are
untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only
story.’

The Muse
quotes:

‘Not all of us receive
the ends that we deserve.’

‘This is what she
taught me: you have to be ready in order to be lucky. You have to put your
pieces into play.’

‘That if you really
want to see your work to completion, you have to desire it more than you’d
believe you have to fight it, fight yourself. It’s not easy.’

‘It doesn’t matter what’s the truth; what people believe becomes the
truth.’

‘In the end, a piece of art only succeeds when its creator – to
paraphrase Olive Schloss – possesses the belief that brings it into being’

*Thank you to Picador and NetGalley for the chance to read an ARC of The Muse.

Monday, August 8, 2016

Destined to destroy
empires, Mia Covere is only ten years old when she is given her first lesson in
death.

Six years later, the child raised in shadows takes her first steps towards
keeping the promise she made on the day that she lost everything.

But the chance to strike against such powerful enemies will be fleeting, so if
she is to have her revenge, Mia must become a weapon without equal. She must
prove herself against the deadliest of friends and enemies, and survive the tutelage
of murderers, liars and demons at the heart of a murder cult.

The shadows love her. And they drink her fear.

The first line lays it out how it is – this book is going to
hold nothing back:

‘People often shit
themselves when they die, did you know that?’

There will be no holding back.

The first chapter is very cleverly composed, and Kristoff
hooks you immediately with his skill. There is a brilliant linguistic and
syntactic equation of acts of sex and death in these opening paragraphs. For
the reader, they happen simultaneously and simultaneously they are opposites
and the same. They echo and mirror each other in so many ways and are
contrasted only by alternating italicised and roman paragraphs. Reading these
opening scenes is a visceral experience, and incredibly immersive.

The parallels between love and death re-emerge throughout
the book. On her way to earn her place at the Red Church, the training school for
assassins, Mia meets future fellow-student and friend, Tric. When he sees her
fighting for the first time he notes that she and opponent move ‘like first time lovers – hesitant at first,
drifting closer until finally they fell into each other’s arms, fists and
elbows and knees, block and counters and strikes’. There are sharp moments
of foreshadowing and the whole narrative is a puzzle coming together, twisting
into a hugely exciting, adrenaline-fuelled conclusion. The final third is
impossible to tear yourself away from. In a twisted way, I appreciated and
welcomed its brutality. It lures you into a false sense of security and then
shatters it, which I felt it was something it really needed to do to avoid
falling into certain clichés.

Mia’s full character and past is unveiled to us slowly and
in snatches but it is worth the wait and the whole story is better for it. Mia
is different to the other assassins-in-training – she is Darkin, and has an intriguing relationship with and degree of power
over, shadows. Her constant companion is a very mysterious shadow cat named
Mister Kindly. He consumes her fear and helps her sleep through the night – for
reasons revealed as you read. I think there is much more to come from him as he
is very much an enigma in this first book but their relationship is very unique
and one of the more intriguing and different elements of the story. There are
many books with training academies, trials, teens set against each other,
assassins etc. but Kristoff knows how to write fantasy and he infuses Nevernight with enough other elements –
foreshadowing, shocking twists, and stylistic flourishes that it embeds itself
in your conscious as you read and remains long after – leaving you wanting
more. I’ve pre-ordered the black sprayed-edges edition from Waterstones and
look forward to learning more about Mia and Mister Kindly in particular.

Reading a digital ARC, without proper formatting, did make
the footnote element of the narrator’s voice a bit disruptive. I’m reserving
judgement on the narrative voice until I’ve read more but at this stage it
feels an unnecessary extra, ‘telling’ things rather than allowing them to come
up naturally in the story. It’s tone is sometimes a little cloying – but
reading a finished copy may be a different experience in that regard and I’m
sure it’s purpose will be clear further down the line.

I do have one more spoiler-y point to raise for discussion
or general musing: I did have qualms about a certain practice in the Red Church
(and Mia consenting to it) – and that is essentially the plastic surgery
(weaving) they have to go through – to be made physically alluring (bigger
breasts etc). In some respects I thought the controversial, more complicated
aspects of this were glossed over, as Mia, and even Tric (who initially has
reservations) go along with it mostly without comment. In some ways, it’s a
shame because Mia is someone initially described as plain, small and scrawny –
but someone who has so much power and is so talented that her appearance has
never mattered. On the other hand, this could equally be more of a commentary
on the morally contentious nature of the Red Church and what it wants to
transform people into. It’s something to consider again once the series is
finished perhaps.

‘You are luckier than
you know. You were born without that which most people prize their loves for.
That ridiculous prize called beauty. You know what it is to be overlooked. Know
it keenly enough that you paid a boy to love you…’

After all, the Red Church is all about fashioning a new type
of being; a complete assassin, and will remake those it needs to. The stakes
are high and only the strongest will prevail and be accepted.

‘Forget
the girl who had everything. She died when her father did … Nothing is where
you start. Own nothing. Know nothing. Be nothing.’

‘It may
not be right,’ Aalea said. ‘It may not be just. But this is a world of Senators
and Consuls and Luminatii – of republics and cults and institutions built and
maintained almost entirely by men. And in it, love is a weapon. Sex is a
weapon. Your eyes? Your body? Your smile?’ she shrugged, ‘weapons. And they
give you more power than a thousand swords. Open more gates than a thousand war
walkers. Love has toppld Kings, Mia. Ended empires. Even broken our poor,
sunburned sky.'

I find myself intrigued by this world that Kristoff is
weaving and I’m certainly going to read on. I like the darkness, the mystery
and the brutality; too many fantasies get bogged down in over-bearing,
contrived romance plots and it seems that Kristoff is dodging that trap for the
most part. It’s got its own distinct character but has many of the things I
enjoy in my favourite fantasies (Throne
of Glass, Game of Thrones…) and is certainly unafraid to push the
boundaries of your expectations. I respect that Mia is a complex, layered,
character who – by her own nature and belief- may be hard to love, and I look
forward to learning more about her and her shadow cat (‘who is not a cat’). I want to see this world and mythology grow
even more into its own in the sequels to come and anticipate them eagerly.

Some other choice quotes:

'Listen,
girl,’ Aelius sniffed. ‘The books we love, they love us back. And just as we
mark our places in the pages, those pages leave their marks on us. Indelible as
the ink that graces them. I can see it in you, sure as I see it in me. You’re a
daughter of words. A girl with a story to tell.’

‘A few
thought her some thing from the abyss; some daemonic servant of the mother set
on their trail. Others mistook her for a horror from the Whisperwastes; some
monstrosity spat into being by the dark pull of twisted magiks. But as she wove
and swayed among them, blades whistling, breath hissing, the swiftest among them
realised she wasn’t a daemon. Not a horror. But a girl. Just a girl. And that
thought terrified them more than any daemon or horror they could name.’ 

Thank you to HarperVoyager and NetGalley for letting me read a digital ARC in exchange for honest review. Nevernight is published on 11th August.

Monday, May 16, 2016

Claire North is certainly one of the authors I admire the
most. She takes on some of the most technically challenging and fiddly subjects to
write about and is very versatile. Yet Touch,
Harry August and Hope all tackle that human desire to leave a mark and to mean something.
To mean something as a human being/life-form and what it is about yourself that
is memorable and can leave an impression. She always challenges you to think
beyond the bounds of the physical and the corporeal. In her books she has tackled the
limits of gender, sexuality, time, memory and more. She is unafraid and quite
unique and because of all this, I will pick up her books without hesitation.

The Sudden Appearance of Hope, a bit like Touch, is part
globe-trotting thriller and part existential crisis/analysis. The focus of the
plot (or one of them) is an app called Perfection which sets goals and rewards
for people to ‘better themselves’. I read The Circle by Dave Eggers just a
month or two before this and they definitely both explore this technological
dystopian theme very well. While you’re reading, you only have to look up and
around you to recognise how precariously balanced society is and how easily it
could slip into something quite frightening. What Perfection is actually
pushing is conformity – a very static set of ideals based on money, body-image
and the like. Both The Circle and The Sudden Appearance of Hope touch upon the
idea of the end of privacy, the constant need to share, the setting of goals
and the reward schemes that only reward certain, approved behaviours – a subtle
brainwashing and defining of worthiness. The chasing of targets and the
relentless measuring of your life by strangers and trend-setters, telling you
what it is to be worthy and when you deserve reward is juxtaposed with Hope’s
innate condition of forgettability. The moment she turns her back, she is
forgotten – by her family, her ‘friends’, by anyone she meets – except technology.
The only path she leaves is digital.

Hope cannot have a job, cannot own property, cannot live in
the ways society usually deems meaningful – she cannot legally exist as she is
forgotten within a minute. Hope survives by becoming a criminal – an international
jewel thief. It is as she sets out to steal a jewelled bracelet that Hope and
Perfection are set on a collision course. Shaken by the death of someone
connected to it and seeing the sinister potential of its elements of mind
control, Hope sets herself a meaningful mission – to take it down.

Interestingly, Hope does meet someone like her, a fellow ‘forgettable’,
who it seems becomes memorable by following the scheme of the app and letting
it change him and help him conform. This leaves Hope with a heart-breaking
choice – should she adopt the app herself and become memorable and known to her
family, but as someone else, or honour them in retaining her own sense of
integrity and difference? What if the cure is something worse than the disease?
The only person who remembers Hope fully is her little sister, who has a form of
brain condition.

Yet the process of writing her story is also a way of
enacting meaning and leaving a trace. ‘I write this to be remembered.’ is one of
the opening lines of the novel: ‘Whoever you are: these are my words. This is
my truth. Listen, and remember me’. To cope Hope takes it upon herself to talk
to scholars and monks ‘men and women who’d been held in solitary confinement
for ears on end. You find the happiness
you can, one said. Sometimes it’s
hard, sometimes you gotta dig deep, but it’s there, the thing inside that you
can be content.’ For Hope’s condition is a life sentence of its own – her world
can only be a long solitary confinement with fleeting instances of connection.

‘Alone you can lose
yourself, or you may find yourself, and most of the time you do both’.

One of the main repeated encounters Hope has throughout her
quest is with a lady called Byron, someone who seems somewhat envious of Hope’s
condition – telling her that ‘to be
forgotten is to be free, you know that, don’t you?’. And this is another
interesting discourse that unfolds throughout the narrative – the definition of
freedom, and how people would live without inhibition, knowing they could
never be caught, they could do anything, get away with anything. Byron is
excited by the prospect, wanting to live without limits, not understanding Hope’s
discipline (‘you have no need to conform,
what’s the point? No one will thank you for it, no one will remember you.’)
– but Hope comes to realise that freedom also means honouring the freedom of
those around her – that self-discipline is crucial and she must impose her own
limits and meaning (the idea that freedom that impinges upon the freedom of
others is wrong). To some extent – you have to ‘permit yourself to be defined by the world that surrounds you’. The
whole exchange and the relationship between these two women is written
brilliantly – in some ways they are so similar and yet there are fundamental
philosophical differences that are unpacked very neatly and effectively.

‘I impose disciplines upon
myself, discourse, reason, knowledge…’

‘To fill the place
where society should be?’

‘Yes. And to keep me
sane. To help me see myself as others might see.’

Some of the most poignant passages come in Hope’s longing to
mean something to her family and the brilliance of North’s writing shines
through in one of the descriptions of Hope’s mother:

‘Mum comes in. Her
hair is bright white, cut down to the surface of her skull, and age has made
her face something extraordinary. Each part of it needs an atlas to describe;
her chin is many chins, still small and sharp but etched with muscle and line,
layered one upon the other. Her cheeks are contoured bone and silky rivers of
skin, her eyebrows waggle against great parallels of thought on her forehead,
her mouth is encased in smile lines and pout lines and scowl lines and worry
lines and laughter lines and there is no
part of her which is not in some way written over with stories’.

Hope can see all the markings of experience and all the
imperfections and find beauty in them – a kind of beauty that Perfection would
never recognise. She knows that her mother could never love the being that
Perfection would make of her.

As a character, you pity Hope, but at no point does the book
make an emotional spectacle of her tragic condition – it productively explores
the nature of it and draws up on it poignantly when it needs to. The parallel
plot involving the jewel heist and Perfection balances the narrative and paces
it, while also cementing the relevance of these timeless, universal questions
in the modern, digital age. An age in which we leave a constant digital trail but long,
enduring, meaningful engagements are in decline and under threat.

The only thing I do find with some of North's book is that it's sometimes hard to engage with, keep track of and remember the wide variety of secondary characters (if you’re not
careful, you might find yourself a bit
lost) but do persevere and revisit – it’s worth it in the end and you will find
yourself wanting to go back to this book again. Touch was one of my Books of 2015.

Fittingly, The Sudden Appearance of Hope is
unforgettable.

*Thank you to Orbit of Little Brown Book Group UK and NetGalley for letting me read a digital ARC in exchange for honest review. The Sudden Appearance of Hope is published on 19th May 2016.

Further quotes:

The past
was just a present that had been, the future was a present yet to come, and
only now remained, and I stood by the sea, recovering my landlegs from the
road, and wept.

Knowledge.
What should I do with this place inside me where experience – tears of joy,
shrieks of laughter, the anxiety of work, the warmth of friends, the love of
family, the expectations of the world – what should I do with that place which
was never filled? I put knowledge there. And in knowledge, I find myself. This
sounds like an intellectual void where heart should be, but look and you may
find…

Look for
the words “perfect woman” and you find bodies. Diagrams, explaining that the
perfect face belongs to an actress with smoky eyes, the perfect hair comes from
a princess; the perfect waist is barely narrow enough to support the generous
breasts that balance on it; legs disproportionately long, smile that says “take
me”. Photoshopped features combining the faces of movie stars and models, pop
idols and celebrities. Who is the perfect woman? According to the internet, she
is a blonde white girl with bulimia; no other characteristics are specified.

Know thyself,
and know everyone else. Having no one else to know me, having no one to catch
me or lift me up, tell me I’m right or wrong, having no one to define the
limits of me. I have to define myself, otherwise I am nothing, just a … liquid
that dissolves. Know yourself. But finding definition without all the… the
daily things that give you shape…’

Thursday, April 7, 2016

*This review may contain spoiler for the first book in the series, The Fire Sermon, and minor spoilers for The Map of Bones.

So when I reviewed The Fire Sermon, the first book in this
series, I wrote this:

‘I really want Haig to
give the reader more in the sequels. More insight, more internal life, more
complexity, more basis for how the world is, more believability, more emotion’

And in book two, The Map of Bones, she delivers. It feels
unburdened and able to breathe more freely following events at the end of the
first book and Kip’s death. Cass now comes into her own as a character and we
get to know her as she goes through grief, and without the distraction of
romantic interests for now. There is much more interiority and the prose
blossoms in these moments. There is also more travelling and journeying but it doesn’t
feel like filler, events unfold naturally and there are certainly big
game-changing ones that occur.

We get to know more about Zoe, stripping the layers away as the book goes on, but
Piper is still a slightly more one-dimensional character – I haven’t quite got
a hold on him yet. The villains (Zach and co.) are also quite limited but mainly because there isn't really a chance to spend much time with them. I enjoyed this as a sequel – and second books are probably the hardest to get
right in a trilogy. If some of those secondary characters develop more in the
third then I think we’re onto a winner.

The Map of Bones, perhaps even more so than being a
dystopian quest-narrative, is a solemn, bleak meditation on memory and grief,
and what it is to really know someone. Haig comes into her forte with some of
Cass’s and Zoe’s reflective moments and inner struggles – for example, this
beautiful line on the way we remember someone after they’re gone:

“…but I betrayed her,
too, when I only remembered the bad parts. I should have remembered her
properly, even though it’s harder.”

It’s a deeply moving moment and a cathartic one both for the
characters and the reader. The journey they go on in this book is as much
mental and emotional as it is physical, and you do feel like they’ve travelled
a long distance in both by the end.

The gradual revealing of more and more about the blast and
the Before is also very effective. It is implied that the people of the Before
advanced too far with their machinery and technology, all leading to a nuclear
disaster. Hence the intense mistrust of tanks and other machinery by the
residents in the After (except for Zach and some of the other Alphas who want
to use it for their own cruel purposes).

"It’s always said that
everything’s broken, since the blast,” [Piper] said. “And we both know there’s
plenty that’s broken enough.” There were so many different kinds of brokenness
to choose from. The broken-down mountains, slumped into heaps of slag and
scree. The towns and cities from the Before, the bones of a world. Or the
broken bodies he’d seen, too many to count.

“…what good ever came
out of the Before? The one thing that we know for certain about these people is
that they, and their machines, destroyed the world. They brought about all of
this.” – The Ringmaster

The pacing and the subtlety is much stronger throughout the narrative
and, a true poet, Haig’s imagery is incredibly powerful and memorable.

‘I was a walking
emissary of the deadlands, spreading ash wherever I went.’

‘This was how violence
worked, I was learning: it refused to be contained. It spread, a plague of
blades.’

‘Words were bloodless symbols
we relied on to keep the world at bay.’

More forces and perspectives are coming to play and the world
is both deepening and expanding. The language and imagery is very evocative and
visual and I’m beginning to see how it could be compared to The Road by Cormac
McCarthy in terms of atmosphere and landscape. I now have high hopes for book three. Some readers may struggle more with
this one as the pacing is slower than other recent offerings in the genre, but there are key moments of
action and reveals are measured and gradual. I personally found this much more rewarding
than frustrating – where book one was a bit more hit-and-miss with pace, this one
finds a consistent balance.

If you've read The Fire Sermon and, like me, weren't sure, then I definitely recommend you give this a read as it adds much, much more and Haig stylistically hits her rhythm. This trilogy is beginning to lay its own ground and I look forward to reading more.

Discussion Point:

I guess there is a certain discussion point that did spring
to my mind when I was thinking about these books: Haig certainly makes the
Omegas our heroes – and defines them by deformity, and yet the protagonist/hero
that she gives us is one who is an exception – who does not have a physical
deformity and is ‘special’. What does this say in the climate of diversity? Is
it a missed opportunity or is there a more intricate exploration of the mental
health of someone with Cass’s powers? I’d be interested to hear what others
think. I think it’s very complicated given the premise of the novels but I
found The Map of Bones a good and
thought-provoking read nonetheless and trust Haig’s intentions and knowledge of
the world and characters she is building.

I like that there is a very interesting choice that the characters are faced with by the end *potential spoiler alert*: is it better for everyone to be equal, although all with a degree of 'deformity', or for the Alpha-Omega twin-death bond to continue? It's going to be very interesting to unpack in the next book as it certainly complicates the endgame of the different parties.Further quotes:

-“…although
you like to think you’re so far above the assumptions and prejudices of the
rest of the world, it turns out you’re not so different from them after all.” - Zoe

- 'Hope was not a decision I made. It was a
stubborn reflex. The body squirming toward the air. The taking of the next
breath, and the one after that.'*Thank you to Gallery Books (US) and HarperVoyager (UK) for letting me read a digital ARC in exchange for honest review.

Saturday, April 2, 2016

i. A brief section of music composed
of a series of notes and flourishes.

ii. A journey by water; a voyage.

iii. The transition from one place
to another, across space and time.

In one devastating night, violin
prodigy Etta Spencer loses everything she knows and loves. Thrust into an
unfamiliar world by a stranger with a dangerous agenda, Etta is certain of only
one thing: she has traveled not just miles but years from home. And she’s
inherited a legacy she knows nothing about from a family whose existence she’s
never heard of. Until now.

Nicholas Carter is content with his
life at sea, free from the Ironwoods—a powerful family in the colonies—and the
servitude he’s known at their hands. But with the arrival of an unusual
passenger on his ship comes the insistent pull of the past that he can’t escape
and the family that won’t let him go so easily. Now the Ironwoods are searching
for a stolen object of untold value, one they believe only Etta, Nicholas’
passenger, can find. In order to protect her, he must ensure she brings it back
to them—whether she wants to or not.

Together, Etta and Nicholas embark
on a perilous journey across centuries and continents, piecing together clues
left behind by the traveler who will do anything to keep the object out of the
Ironwoods’ grasp. But as they get closer to the truth of their search, and the
deadly game the Ironwoods are playing, treacherous forces threaten to separate
Etta not only from Nicholas but from her path home... forever.

This was an intriguing adventure-romance which delves into history and time travel with care and detail. As a novel, it explores issues of family, race and identity in different time-contexts.

Bracken's knowledge and historical detail is one of the strongest aspects of Passenger. I enjoyed the construction of each world, and wish we could have spent longer in each time to really see these primary characters adapt, develop and relate. Their adventure and romance sometimes felt a bit too rushed, despite both Nicholas and Etta being interesting individual characters. The romantic tension did feel a little forced and too detailed, leaving little time for the chemistry to build somewhat independently of the text itself. Nicholas is a very guarded character, understandably so given his time and origins as the child of a slave and her master. It is understandable for him to be guarded from Etta and those around him in the story, but with a two-character alternating narrative, Bracken perhaps could have let the reader in a little more. We don't get many private moments with him, whereas we really benefit from the opening chapters with Etta.

I really enjoyed the opening chapters as we get to know Etta and what drives her and her love of music. Bracken writes these scenes brilliantly and really gets in Etta's head, and introducing the key relationships in her New York 2015 life. Similarly, there are some really nice moments with Nicholas on the ship, in his own time, with his sort of surrogate ship family. I would have loved to see these play out a little longer before the protagonists are thrown together.

Again you don't really get a strong sense of the character of the villain - Cyrus Ironwood - but the history of the families is bound to be expanded upon in the sequel and I am looking forward to learning more - those family/surrogate family elements were some of the things that really hooked me. At this stage, Cyrus just exists to impose a sense of threat and a ticking-clock to carry the plot forward in this first book.

Overall, it's a slow, careful and intriguing build (except for the romance angle, which I found a little too forced and rushed). It would have been nice to see the chemistry and relationship between Etta and Nicholas develop more organically, but the writing is very much 'telling you' it's happening. In terms of plot, the pace zooms into overdrive in the final few chapters and the ending is a whirlwind of a cliff-hanger which should fire nicely into the sequel and shake things up a bit. I'm intrigued by this world, particularly the negotiations of different cultures and the time-travel concept that Bracken is building and will pick up the sequel with interest when it arrives.

Thank you to Quercus Children's Books for a chance to read an eARC via NetGalley. This book is out in the UK on the 7th of April!

Sunday, March 6, 2016

Frances has always been a study machine with one goal, elite university. Nothing will stand in her way; not friends, not a guilty secret – not even the person she is on the inside.

But when Frances meets Aled, the shy genius behind her favourite podcast, she discovers a new freedom. He unlocks the door to Real Frances and for the first time she experiences true friendship, unafraid to be herself. Then the podcast goes viral and the fragile trust between them is broken.

Caught between who she was and who she longs to be, Frances’ dreams come crashing down. Suffocating with guilt, she knows that she has to confront her past…

She has to confess why Carys disappeared…

Meanwhile at uni, Aled is alone, fighting even darker secrets.

It’s only by facing up to your fears that you can overcome them. And it’s only by being your true self that you can find happiness.

Frances is going to need every bit of courage she has.

The good news – Alice Oseman’s second novel is just as good
as her first. It captures the next stage of life – the move from school to
university - while exploring some really important issues around school success
and how teenagers are taught to define their self-worth. Again she involves
the Tumblr generation in a realistic (but not cringe-y) way. She also draws in
fandoms, the perks and flaws of social media, male-female friendship,
ethnicity, sexuality and so much more and they all weave together in a very
engaging way that today’s generation will definitely appreciate.

Radio Silence is a must-read for those in their final years at
school.

‘If I didn’t get into
Cambridge, everything I had tried to be throughout my school life would be a
total waste.’ – Frances, Radio
Silence

The historical associations of Oxbridge – as the only
destination for the best and brightest – the prestige, the privilege – the confirmation
of genius, the mythical guarantee of success, it is still lorded over today’s
children. It is still the pillar against which schools measure and brandish
their greatness and often a factor in parents of a certain background selecting
the institution they wish their children to go to. But Oxbridge isn’t, or
shouldn’t be relevant anymore. The Oxbridge ideal is out of date and it’s
actively harmful to the way kids think and what they strive for. Many are
measuring their self-worth on archaic and narrow ideals. I really relate to
Frances’ plight in this regard. I think Alice is brilliant at really getting
into the very real struggle and sorrow that Frances goes through – she acknowledges
that you could argue it is coming from a position of privilege in the
first-world – that it seems selfish and ungrateful but that doesn’t mean it isn’t
any less real and important and doesn’t hurt. Frances’ quest for Cambridge and
that whole part of her experience gave me so many flashbacks and it honestly
reads so truly – I think so many people who haven’t felt understood or
represented before will feel a wave of relief when reading this book. Some teenagers
work really hard, get on with their parent(s), aren’t just interested in
parties, drinking and romance and still have an absolutely engaging and complex story to
tell.

Your whole life for about 16 years, is school, university is
the focus and end-goal imposed on you, and you so desperately want to be special
and worth something but you have such narrow parameters within which to define
that success. Radio Silence really
got me thinking again about those years at school, approaching university, and I
really hope that it starts a conversation in terms of the curriculum, degrees
and maybe just understanding generally what a lot of people are going through
and how we can help them.

I remember a lot of people telling me that university
was the best time of their life, and maybe that’s true for some but for others
it is a melting pot of anxiety and academic frustration and homesickness and
confusion. You could come from school where all your essays got top grades and
suddenly find yourself floundering in a place with very little guidance on
offer and which still only really rewards people who think in a certain way
(usually the way of the person marking the work, if you’re doing the
Humanities). I was also told at school that I'd really enjoy university (I studied English Literature) as there was so much freedom and I could write about whatever I wanted however I wanted. That wasn't true. In some ways I found it much more restrictive - they still wanted me to think a certain way and write in a very formulaic way and it quashed my inspiration and enjoyment and my desire to really think for myself. I still love English Literature, and I did learn new ways of thinking and was introduced to some great literature and had a couple of great professors but I also was so relieved to escape it afterwards and be master of my own learning and writing again - to try and recapture some inspiration and sense of identity. Some people find themselves, many also lose themselves – and it’s
really interesting and desperately sad to see that happen to Aled in Radio Silence.

I really appreciated the focus on friendship, academic life
and family. So many of these books, particularly in this age-group, get wrapped
up in romance and love-interests and it’s so refreshing not to have that –
because, personally, that wasn’t my focus at that age, and it doesn’t seem like
it’s Frances’ either – work and finding friends you can be yourself with both
feel far bigger and more intense. The platonic relationships in Radio Silence are so, so powerful and
moving and heart-warming that you don’t need any contrived romance plot.

The cast of the book is brilliant and diverse – but not in a
box-checking way, it's all written with so much care and attention to detail that you
feel connected to every character and you appreciate all the things that make them
unique. Alice writes so well about these things partly because she is a clever,
talented writer, and also because she is true to herself and her experience and
is living the world she is writing and reflecting on experiences that are far
more recent than an older adult thinking back and trying to make their
experience apply to today’s youth. She’s unflinchingly honest, articulate and
observant and it’s very much needed in this contemporary market. I couldn’t put
it down – I read late into the night and on the train and am still thinking
about it.

The podcast narrative is beautiful and tragic and unique, as
was the look at the way people interact with their ‘obsessions’ on Tumblr – it
can be a frighteningly intense, even dangerous, place but Oseman also shows the
creativity and sense of community it can foster. You can start to understand the way people think and interact in these new ways as the world evolves and all the repercussions of those interactions.

This book is a message – don’t get trapped, question
everything – question what you want and what society/school is telling you and
whether it’s right for you and be yourself because otherwise there is a lot of
suffering that you could fall into. Don’t let your school try to define you by
the universities you apply to or the subjects you study, laugh at the ones who
try to hand-pick and coach you to get into Oxbridge, just find the things and
the people you love and hold on tight.

Radio Silence is
one of the books on the market that is most worth reading right now, because you
won’t have read anything like it, you won’t have met these characters before –
none of them are ‘types’ and you may even finally feel understood and able to
process the confusing and messy years of your teenage/young adult life. Even if
it’s not your personal experience or something you can relate to, it’s worth
reading to spend a few hours in the heads of these very real characters and to
see the world through their eyes. Oseman brings so many new, overlooked or marginalised voices into play and has hopefully given them a real platform in YA and it's brilliant community.

*I received this book as an ARC for honest review on NetGalley. Thank you to HarperCollins Childrens for the chance to read it.

Tuesday, January 5, 2016

You don’t just come back to Star Wars because of the
compelling/exciting plot – stripped to it’s bones it is THE plot. Dark vs Light.
Hero vs Villain. Father vs Son. (This is to put it all very simplistically)

You come back because you fall in love with the characters.

That’s what the prequels lacked for me, no one fell in love
with Anakin or Obi Wan or Padme as characters. They were fairly wooden. And I
didn’t hate those films – I found bits of them painful and the acting was
lacking but I was interested in the journey Anakin took to becoming Vader. It
could have been executed a lot better, but there were bits I did enjoy. They
lacked heart. Both The Force Awakens and the original trilogy have earnest,
excited characters with lots of life inside them that you feel protective of
and affection for. They inspired your love.

You come back for Luke Skywalker, Han Solo and Princess Leia.
Three icons who have endured the years.

And you will come back for Finn, Rey and Poe because they
inspire the same love that I, and you, felt for that original trio. And that is
a credit to Boyega and Ridley, who are both quite new on this stage, and Isaac
who is just stepping into these kind of action/adventure roles. Ridley must
have felt such pressure and the world on her shoulders – a female lead in a
Star Wars movie – a female with perhaps more power than perhaps any character we’ve
seen before on Star Wars… It’s brilliantly subversive and a huge task – she
would be taken to pieces if she didn’t play it well, but she does – you can see
her passion so visibly on screen. She plays it with youthful energy and wonder
and excitement – you can feel her excitement both as an actress and a character to
be part of this – and you can feel that that’s how you’d be if you were in those shoes too.

It’s the same with Finn – he seems breathlessly excited in his acting – he’s charming
and funny and you want to learn with him and Rey as they take their first steps.
Poe fits so naturally – like he was born into that role. Rey and Boyega interact
brilliantly and wittily, and it’s so fun to watch their friendship grow as they
both get thrown into these new worlds and roles. The old cast are very much
mentors and it’s great to see them again but it’s really just as exciting
spending a lot of time with Rey and Finn. Forget the ‘political correctness’
and agenda-filled debates and enjoy this because Rey and Finn have already
shown they’re so much more than that. Many of the complainers and nay-sayers have
the wrong priorities and are just voicing insecurities. These two actors and
characters are more than capable of sustaining and reviving a love for Star
Wars and what it’s always been at it’s heart.

In the same way your favourite character could be any of
Luke or Han or Leia – here you could pick almost anyone and it’s so fun to have
all these options – all different in their own way.

I LOVE Rey and I feel strongly protective of her and Daisy
Ridley – I, and probably many women who
grew up watching Star Wars and wanting to be part of it, feel such an affinity
to her and that’s already given me so much more than I hoped for from this
film. To have Rey – whose eyes light up at ships and droids and scavenging - in
a Star Wars film feels so amazing and I’m almost jealous of the young girls who
will grow up watching this and the young boys who will grow up watching her and
Finn and Poe and have them as their first point of hero. (I’m not saying Leia
wasn’t awesome – she definitely was and is – but Rey is another great character
for this generation – she is self-sufficient and proactive and in all the
action). The villains were perhaps a bit thinner but I did think Adam Driver
played some of his moments very well – you can see the conflict in him in the
big moments and hopefully his character will grow as the movies progress. Hux
was much more one-dimensional but I think this movie was more focused on
introducing the heroes and the villains will be fleshed out later (Molly Weasley
would still shut him down in a second though).

Yes, it was nostalgic. Yes, it did replicate the plot of the
first one – but I think it did that to recapture that awe and to really show it
was going to put all its effort into launching these characters – because they
are what’s crucial. I am very much a CHARACTER-over-plot person – I know
that might not be the same for a lot of people – but give me good characters,
characters I care for and engage with – and I will watch the movie time and
time again regardless of plot deficiencies, wobbles and moments where I have to
suspend disbelief or ‘not-question-it’. It was the right focus for this film I
think – launching a new trilogy. And there were some moments of surprise and
nice twists and plot mysteries to carry it through too.

I needed to write this after listening to the review by Talking Comics – my favourite podcast.
They always get reviews and debates pitch perfect and they inspired all these
thoughts and this excitement to bubble up in me, so that I word-vomited this
out as soon as I got home from work. I’m so excited for this saga to continue
and just for how thrilling it is to be back on this ride with great characters
and a captivated audience.

I have several reviews and thought-pieces in the works for books by Louise O'Neill, Howard Jacobson, Victoria Aveyard, Sabaa Tahir and G. Willow Wilson (Ms Marvel!) which I will work on over the next few weeks - but this couldn't wait!

Sunday, December 13, 2015

It’s taken me weeks to get this done, even though it’s
technically only a few points and thoughts on Mockingjay Part 2. I wanted to communicate it as effectively as I could - be warned, spoilers lie ahead.

The film is very true to the book, apart from a few minor tweaks
which are all fine and probably necessary. I actually remembered, while writing
this, something they completely changed in the first film – Peeta’s leg never
gets amputated in the films. Is there something a little disquieting in that? I
would like to know why, creatively, they made the decision to omit that
completely as it’s really been overlooked. Is anyone else a little bit uncomfortable
about that decision?

Otherwise, I mainly want to focus on some subtle but important changes/creative decisions in the very final scenes. In the book, the
final scene in the field is very layered and powerful – in the film, it seems
like a cashed-in chance to have a semi-happy ending with neat reassurances
(that’s slightly harsh of me, but just comparatively). I felt that in the film
this scene, and this was confirmed by the chuckles of those around me, was too
romanticised (slightly cringe-worthy). Katniss is made up and pristine, babe in
her arms. Peeta is smiling and laughing, frolicking in the grass with another
child while the sun is shining over the heavenly meadow.

This is not the tone I got from the book. In the book, that ‘heavenly’
meadow is a field beneath which lie the bodies of those who died in the war. It
is noted that Katniss was reluctant to have children, remaining despondent
about the world they live in, whereas Peeta wanted to educate them about
courage and goodness. Katniss is afraid that they will have to explain about
the games – something that she can never forget. They create a memory book to
cope with the trauma and horrors that they witnessed, filling it with the good
things that people did and the people who helped them. She and Peeta rely on
each other to survive and get through – it is not so much a romantic decision
as another way to survive – they literally cannot live without the other
because they went through it together.

The
PTSD is very much ever-present and at the fore and perhaps the film could have
communicated that with a cloudier sky and sun trying to break through. These
are two people who cannot stand to continue in society – and have gone away to
heal. It is meant to be both harrowing and as hopeful as a dystopia can be when
there is no winning and only uncertainty and the hope of healing.

Just look at the language used in this epilogue – Katniss is
‘consumed by terror’ when she becomes pregnant, it is all-encompassing and her
children later ‘don’t even know they play on a graveyard’. It’s heavily
emotive, loaded word-choice.

‘One day I’ll have to explain about my nightmares. Why they
came. Why they won’t ever really go away… I’ll tell them that on bad mornings,
it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I’m
afraid it could be taken away. That’s when I make a list in my head of every
act of goodness I’ve seen someone do. It’s like a game. Repetitive. Even a
little tedious after more than twenty years. But there are
much worse games to play.’

It’s a brilliant, unsentimental final paragraph which still
manages to be satisfying while maintaining that classic dystopian bleak ending.

I also felt they didn’t need that scene with Gale raising
the issue of Katniss choosing between him and Peeta. In a way it shows his
immaturity, and the fact that he can never understand what they have gone
through, because to Katniss, that is a triviality. In truth, she wouldn’t be able to recover or deal with PTSD with
Gale, especially after the events with Prim. It’s a fact rather than a
sentimental romantic decision. They didn’t need to play up the love triangle.
For me, Gale and Peeta are – to some extent – devices to symbolise Just War theory. Gale is the
reckless, impulsive revolutionary who thinks the means are justified by the
ends. Book-Peeta is the voice; he is the negotiating table, the offer of bread
in the rain – he is compassion and morality. That is the triangle. And Katniss
is somewhere in between – she is survival. She wants to protect the people she
loves but still has reservations about how she does that. She is moulded and
used by those around her until she makes that final decision and act of agency,
completely by herself – to kill Coin. That is when she truly becomes an active
agent in her own right.

I’m still not completely sure it was necessary or beneficial
(besides earning a lot of money) to split the film in two. Some of the deaths
would have had a lot more impact had the narrative been allowed to flow in one
film (eg. Finnick and Prim). It lost its momentum in terms of the characters at
times. They didn’t need to make the journey through the Capitol quite so
drawn-out and games-ish. With some good editing, it could have been one
excellent film rather than two quite good ones. Talking to some people, they
didn’t really register Prim’s death – which is a moment of huge and layered
consequences. Everything that Katniss has done right from the beginning has
been for her sister – right from that first reaping. And the moment her sister
is needlessly and senselessly killed by her own side is the ultimate moment of
Absurdity – it’s the moment where Katniss must feel that everything has been
for nothing, it’s all been a waste. The girl that Gale has been watching over,
is killed by a cruel weapon of his own design. It's a brilliant and cruel twist by Collins.

‘First I get a glimpse of the blond braid down her back. Then, as she
yanks off her coat to cover a wailing child, I notice the duck tail formed by
her untucked shirt.’

Again, it’s very powerfully written, recalling that scene at
the first reaping – only this time, Katniss can’t save her:

‘I have the same
reaction I did the day Effie Trinket called her name at the reaping. At least,
I must go limp, because I find myself at the base of the flagpole, unable to
account for the last few seconds. Then I am pushing through the crowd, just as
I did before. Trying to shout her name above the roar. I’m almost there, almost
to the barricade, when I think she hears me. Because for just a moment, she
catches sight of me, her lips form my name.

And that’s when the
rest of the parachutes go off.’

In book and film, Katniss struggles to grieve – to feel –
until Buttercup reappears. Buttercup is the emotional trigger that Katniss
needs to break the depressive cycle – to purge herself, and it works
brilliantly.

The cast was excellent – truly perfect and I don’t think any
other could have pulled it off. Lionsgate have done a great job with this
series and I just hope they don’t force a prequel or any spin-offs – I will not
watch them – this story deserves to stand alone and be taken seriously. I would
have preferred a bleaker tone to the ending in line with the book but this
remains probably one of the best book to film adaptations – particularly if
we’re going by YA book-to-film (though I’m resistant to the idea that The Hunger Games should be confined to
YA – it’s leagues above most of the other dystopias in there (Divergent, Ember in the Ashes, Red Queen, and many others, in terms of
layers and depth) – and I will definitely keep revisiting it. I would give the
first film 10/10 for its tension and build up and film-work. The second one
gets a 9 and Mockingjay parts 1 & 2 get a 7.5 I think, because I feel a bit
may have been lost in the two-parter format, despite some really strong
attention to detail and a big emphasis on how Katniss is used. Performances
were still brilliant. Donald Sutherland is absolutely perfect as Snow and
Julianne Moore comes into her own as Coin in Part 2. Philip Seymour Hoffman mastered the ambiguity of his character and he is a talent that the world will always miss - an incredible actor. Jennifer Lawrence is simply the best actress of her generation - she owns every film she is in.

As an additional point – it keeps grating on me that many
are still casting Katniss as the ultimate ‘kick-ass
heroine’ or ‘strong female warrior’. (Interestingly the marketing and posters for the film are exactly the kind of thing you'd think District 13 would make, which is (hopefully, if on purpose) very clever). Katniss hunts to feed her family, she
always, always tries to survive for them. That is her only motivation
throughout most of the story. She is not a revolutionary, not directly, but she
is used by them. Every time that you say that Katniss wants to lead her
district or win a revolution or assert moral leadership – you are falling for
the rhetoric of District 13, and even the Capitol, and their terms of what
makes a hero. Seeing her as a strong female action hero in that
warrior/revolutionary sense misses the point and only perceives things within
the limits of those views. She is not a hero – at least not in the way that she
is cast by them and sometimes by us. She is much more than that – she is a
flawed, human being – a woman forced to be both parents to Prim, who will
protect the ones she loves, who can be manipulated and used but who takes a
final stand against those who control her and rejects them entirely. She is a strong
because she walks away from a world stuck on repeat – where the next society
may not be any better than the last and the only promise is that of continued
manipulation and potential future violence and revenge. Her heroic traits are
that she cares about people, and her small acts of goodness are the most
powerful – her care for Rue, for her sister, her compassion and empathy for
people on either side and her willingness to consider the morality of both
sides where others wouldn’t.

Mockingjay is my
favourite of The Hunger Games books
because it really fulfils its dystopian premise and satisfyingly concludes one
of the best books ever written about war and consumerism, image manipulation,
reality TV and the cycle of violence and revenge that pervades many aspects of
human society.

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Introducing

Have been passionate about literature all my life, books have been my only constant. I love to write, read and also play football! Now going to blog about art, music and film too when I feel the urge :)